Mailing lists

The mtb-oz lists have moved

Click the links on the left for the new Mailman interface for the MTB-OZ family of mailing lists.

There are currently three lists. MTB-OZ is the original and noisiest. MTB-OZ-serious is, as its name suggests , a list for 'serious' discussion of mountain biking. In the MTB-OZ world, that means discussion should be on-topic, but can still be frivolous. MTB-OZ-chix is for female mountain bikers, though a few confused males lurk there too.

Why did we leave Topica?

I was unhappy almost from the day we moved there with the service MTB-OZ got from the last hosts of the mtb-oz mailing lists, topica.com. Topica's big advantage is that it's free. Its big disadvantage is that it's basically a provider of email marketing services, and you have to look pretty closely to differentiate what Topica does from a posh spam house.

In addition, Topica's level of automation is irritating for even remotely clueful list managers, and the current list management team is scarily clueful (excepting myself of course). That the system constantly turns off subscriptions after one bounce is immensely annoying, and that it really gets on badly with Optus had become totally irritating.

Over the years we also saw Topica arbitrarily stop sending messages to people whose subscriptions were otherwise active, and its web interface for managing the list had become slower and slower - it now updates just once per day, making it impossible to tell whether there are jobs that actually need doing or if another moderator has seen to them.

In short, it's a pain.

So, we bailed. Big thanks to Matt Barr, who did all the legwork necessary to adapt Mailman to the environment here at phpwebhosting.